What is SAFe® and is it right for me?

SAFe is a framework that draws on agile practices for team effectiveness. It uses lean and agile practices to help those agile teams excel. It aligns teams in an effective and coordinated fashion toward a common goal.

In the early days of agile, agile and Scrum in particular focused on individual teams. It helped teams of around 5-12 people become effective at software delivery. Supporting practices of how larger groups could leverage these benefits were lacking.

At this time, I was working as a program manager, managing programs of 50-100 people. I knew there was something to this agile thing. I struggled to understand how to apply it to large programs.

This is the use case that SAFe supports . For technology driven work of 50 people or more SAFe is an excellent choice. Less than 40-50 people and SAFe can be top-heavy. A few coordinated scrum teams might be enough. The extra roles and overhead of SAFe is too much overhead. From that number though, SAFe enables you to scale up to the largest systems. Currently SAFe delivers some very large solutions. Car manufacturers. Brazil Petrochemical. The Swiss rail service. The US Air Force,. NASA. All run programs using SAFe. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of people organise around SAFe Lean-Agile principles.

SAFe is well detailed. I will attempt to summarise it here. Alongside a set of principles, SAFe is a way of identifying and deconstructing work. It does this at various layers of fidelity. L support this delivery. By fidelity, I mean the level of planning and requirements. Much like duplo, lego and technics. The basic operations are the same but the sizes and the level of detail are different.

For example, at the most detailed level, we have requirements expressed as stories. Teams deliver these within an iteration (often two weeks). Above that we have Features. Teams of teams (referred to as Agile Release Trains) deliver these. Agile Release Trains deliver Features within a Planning Interval (8-12 weeks). Finally, above that, we have Epics (big outcomes). Portfolios deliver these over long time periods (many quarters, sometimes years). A Portfolio is a large budgeted group of people. A Portfolio will have associated governance and value management.

At the top of the work hierarchy are strategic themes. These are short concise statements of intent. The portfolio uses them to derive the epics, features and stories.

Where is SAFe Good?

Ongoing Product Delivery

If you have technology delivery that is similar over time,SAFe can be a great way to organise your teams. This is true even when composed of different projects. For example, you have 50 salesforce CRM people and 20 web developers. They are always working on an integrated customer facing system. They have different projects. Their work roughly covers the same technology and serves the same customers.

Major Projects and Programs

SAFe is perfect to deliver large programs in many industries. This includes SAP Hana ERP replacements and completed transformation upgrades. SAFe is clear and structured. It generates clear delivery metrics. It creates transparency. This makes it a great way to track and manage progress. SAFe organises work for modular, iterative delivery. This gives the program sponsors a lot of control of the program. This control is often lacking in traditional waterfall projects.

High Cooperation Needed

The structures of SAFe are both rigid and flexible. The rigidity enables the agility in the same way your skeleton enables you to jump and run. This is useful when you need cross-departmental cooperation. This is also true when you need to cooperate across organisations. And also when dealing with significant vendor dependencies. The common foster cooperation and transparency. This is true even in environments that might otherwise be conflict-ridden. It is especially true of initiatives in trouble. Lean principles and PI planning create an environment for success. Lean procurement and contracting can ensure you incentivize all parties for collaboration.

Burning Platforms

When a large initiative or a delivery area is in serious trouble, SAFe can provide a clear and swift path to reset. SAFe practices can help a program avoid the mistakes of the path. A large troubled program can be hard to reset. SAFe offer a clear set of tools to ‘pull the elephant out of the mud’. SAFe helps identify impediments to finishing work. SAFe values foster an environment where people can surface problems. SAFe creates an environment of shared accountability. In this way, troubled delivery can get traction again without delay. 

Where is SAFe not so good?

Small Teams of Teams

SAFe is often too much overhead for groups of less than 40-50. We need to justify new roles. The extra rigor and process at small scales may hinder rather than assist the flow of work. In these cases well coordinated scrum or kanban teams might be more appropriate.

Unaligned Teams

Sometimes teams are not working together on the same product. nor are they serving the same customer. In these cases it makes little sense to bundle them together in an ART or Portfolio. We sometimes see unrelated teams joined together in a single ART for no better reason than to fit it to SAFe. This can create a weird faux collaborative environment.

Sometimes it doesn't make sense to have the teams share a backlog of work. In these cases it might be better to have small coordinated scrum teams rather than an ART. 

We're Happy the way we are

A SAFe transformation can be a significant investment in time, money, and change. If there is neither a need to fix something, or a desire to perform at a higher level, there is no mandate to change.

What About Waterfall?

A common objection to SAFe is that a our situation is special because we must do a large amount of upfront work. In New Zealand Government, large initiatives must complete 'Better Business Cases'. They must also perform tortuous, well-documented and drawn-out procurement processes.

Dogmatic agile practitioners sometimes respond to these obstacles saying you must remove them. That these large upfront activities are inhibitors to agility. This is very true! But we must recognise we operate in the real world.

SAFe takes a pragamatic approach. In larger initiatives using SAFe we often begin with a high proportion of enabling work. This is work of no immediate direct benefit to our customers, but which enables us to deliver future value. For example, a business case, or a procurement. SAFe recognises this. The framework advises tracking enabling vs customer work.

Over time we try to deliver customer work as soon as possible. We must strive toward the ideals of value delivery, yes. But we must recognise legislative and procedural realities.

Would you like to understand more about SAFe and how it can help you? Why not reach out to me at russell@flowspring.nz or book a deeper dive in how agile at scale can help you and your goals?